Let me try to illustrate my position with one of the more ludicrous moments in IBM history. Back in the days when magnetic tape was the primary medium for databases (such as they were), a tape had to go through a preparatory phase before data could be written to it. That phase consisted of dividing the tape into blocks of equal size by laying down a series of evenly-spaced markers. In other words you divided the tape into the virtual equivalent of pages of a book; so you could then maintain a “directory,” where you could keep track of which information was written on which “pages.” The markers became known as INTER-RECORD GAPS; and there is a notorious IBM document that provides an introduction to databases in which the term “record” is defined as “an interval on the tape between two inter-record gaps.” This is either a profound statement of Zen Spinozism or an object of derision; and, like most of my colleagues, I always opted for the latter. I hope you get the joke, because, if you do not, it may be hard to continue the conversation!

My goal is to find a way in which transition, rather than state, becomes my point of departure for description. I think this is what Heidegger was trying to get at when, in the title to Part One of BEING AND TIME, he talks about “the Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon for the Question of Being.” In other words being is out there on the horizon of time; state arises as a side-effect of process. It is always on the horizon, though, because, if you will forgive the cliche, time is always marching on.

Now I am far from a Heidegger expert (VERY far); but I think that the overall program of BEING AND TIME involved the opposing views of time as that which is between states of being and being as the horizon of time. Having studied his Fichte and his Hegel, Heidegger would then deal with this opposition by seeking out a path of synthesis. THAT is really where I want to go in any setting in which we cannot ignore time, whether it is the management of open-source content (the dialectic between software as a stored executable and software as executing code) or the more philosophical questions of identity in cyberspace (the dialectic between stored records and the being-in-time of behavior). As I believe I have said before, we are all at a disadvantage because they do not teach this sort of stuff in either engineering school or business school; but it has profound implications for how we (not to mention the customers of whatever business we may be in) experience both states and transitions in cyberspace, implications that are just to profound to ignore if we want the Internet to continue to be a valuable asset.

I’m particularly interested in the changing dynamics of the platform as disintermediation bites into distribution.

Awesome post and this is the type of stuff we try to teach our clients. If you haven’t already, check out the awesome publication at MIT Press:

Invisible Engines
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10937

Basically, becoming a platform for others’ success and supporting it.